


Things He Cannot Lose

by churchkey



Series: Long Ago and Far Away (Canon Winnix) [2]
Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: A certain young lady in Aldbourne, Angst, Episode: s01e05 Crossroads, Love Confessions, M/M, Series canon, erection fail, melodramatic pining, melodramatic self-sabatoge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:33:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23911615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/churchkey/pseuds/churchkey
Summary: The guys wrestle with Big Feelings. As they do. Includes completely made-up speculation about Nix's role in Dick's promotion. To everyone whose heart breaks to watch Dick wander around Paris all lovelorn and melancholy in Crossroads - this is for you.Part II in a 6-part series, but also works just fine as a stand-alone.
Relationships: Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters
Series: Long Ago and Far Away (Canon Winnix) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1739950
Comments: 12
Kudos: 85





	Things He Cannot Lose

**Author's Note:**

> “Why must not a man marry?” 
> 
> “He cannot marry. He cannot marry,” he said angrily. “If he is to lose everything, he should not place himself in a position to lose that. He should not place himself in a position to lose. He should find things he cannot lose.”
> 
> From “In Another Country” by Ernest Hemingway

**I. Paris**

He remembered Nix telling him once about how they’d cleaned out the Louvre, boxed it all up and sent it away before the Nazis could get their vile hands on it. Da Vinci, Venus, Socrates, all those treasures locked up tight somewhere in the country. Dick thought of the treasures he’d stored up in his own heart, tucked deep under layers of olive drab, and he understood a little of how it must have felt to wrap up Mona Lisa’s smile and pack her away in an unmarked crate. 

He was used to it now. They never spoke of it or even looked at it straight-on, but Dick knew it was there between them, this delicate gauzy thread that could be severed at any moment. When he buttoned his shirt in the morning, he imagined that he was buttoning it in, folding it safe in the shadows in which they must keep it hidden. Dick protected it like it was his sworn duty. In some ways, it was.

But during quiet moments alone, often at night, but not always, he found himself taking it out, turning it over and over in his mind, rubbing it smooth between his fingers like a fetish. He knew it was dangerous, reckless of him, but he couldn’t help himself. To pretend that whatever it was connecting them was merely carnal, the simple satisfaction of base human urges, chafed at every moral fiber of his being. 

Dick possessed many skills, had proved his mettle time again under the most impossible circumstances, but to lie to himself was something he simply could not do. Or lie to Nix, which amounted to the same.

Why hadn’t he said it? The words were right there on his tongue. 

_Don’t go to Aldbourne. I don’t want you to see her._

Instead, he’d just tightened his lips and let his face go inscrutable for a moment. Lew said nothing, gave no hint that he knew what Dick was thinking. He was waiting to hear it too. When Dick didn’t say it, it was as good as an endorsement. The silence expanded, pushed everything else to the corners of the room, and it just sat there on his desk untouched, that damn weekend pass that Nix had handed down like a sentence. Dick was caught somewhere between contrition and rage at the horrible injustice of it all. 

“See ya in a couple days” was what he’d actually said. _See ya_. And he does. Dick sees him everywhere. 

In coffee black as his hair, smoke thick as his stubble. In granite columns, erect as his chest at attention. In arches rounded like his shoulders, sloped under the weight of a worry he thinks Dick doesn’t see. Empty museums are monuments to his intellect. Cathedrals - devotion, sanctified in stone. Lew is all around him. 

During the daylight hours, Dick managed to ignore it for a while. He bought souvenirs and postcards, thinking to fill in the hollow places with ephemera. He busied himself searching high and low for something to take back with him to the front, some proof that there were still such things as truth, beauty, love; that these were still alive somewhere and not ground to dust under the heel of a jackboot. 

But he found too many of the same graceless bodies and accents as everywhere else, too much that was familiar. _This isn’t Paris_ , he thought to himself. _This is an amusement park with better coffee._

After dark, the same urge to forget drove him underground. He wanted to lose himself in the mundane patterns of civilian life, lulled by foreign voices, rocked back into another time by the gentle rhythm of the train. And he did lose himself. And it terrified him. 

He kept his eyes cast down as he walked back to his hotel, on paving stones that shone slick in the lamplight and the fog that drifted up from the sewers. It was weather made for two, and he was just one. Nothing had ever made him feel so lonely or so small. City of lights, city of love, how could you be so dark? 

He’d planned to end the night stretched out in that miracle of a bed, naked limbs sprawled wide across the sheets as he touched himself, imagined all the things he and Nix would do to each other if he were there with him. Safe behind the luxury of a locked door, with all the time in the world and no one to hear them moan and sigh and speak tenderness to each other. But once back in the room, he found his body wasn’t willing. His heart wasn’t really in it, either. 

He strips off the layers and everything falls away, even his own name. And that’s beautiful. It’s all he’d really wanted. To feel the sleek curve of flawless white porcelain as it envelops him, the water shrouding him like arms, like shoulders and legs and lips on his neck. He closes his eyes. Beautiful. 

That night, he dreams of beaches, of cold spray and wind-beaten cliffs. Nix is there, and Dick’s the only one he needs, and the war is over. 

But he’s not sure he can wait that long. 

**II. Aldbourne**

Lew lay on his back smoking a cigarette. He brought his fingers to his lips in a slow, deliberate motion and inhaled, then dropped his hand to rest on his bare chest. He exhaled, and the smoke curled lazily up into the air above the bed. 

A woman’s voice addressed him, but he wasn’t paying much attention to her. Instead, he was carefully studying a crack in the plaster of the ceiling. She might have been telling him that it happened to every man, and not to worry. He wasn’t worried. Not about that. 

“My advice, luv?” She set her foot on the embroidered seat of the vanity stool and pulled the hem of her stocking up over her bent knee. “Leave off the whiskey.”

He heard that part just fine, but he was still too focused on the crack to bother responding. His eyes followed its path from the corner of the room to the light fixture in the center, where it joined with another in a near-perfect ninety degree angle. A crossroads. He sucked on the cigarette again.

“Which one, d’you reckon?” 

He turned his head to look at her; in her hands were two dresses, and she alternated holding one, then the other, up to her body. 

“Green,” he said, though he didn’t much care one way or the other. The waves of shame he’d felt earlier, furiously pumping his cock in a futile attempt to resurrect his waning erection, had calmed to still waters now. She’d gamely offered to use her mouth on him, but he’d waved her off. 

“It’s no use,” he’d said, exhaling a weary sigh as he rolled onto his back. 

She tried to salvage the evening by offering a few weak compliments to his manhood, what fun they’d had the last time, and suggesting they just start it over from the beginning. Perhaps he was just tired. 

But even as she tried to cheer him, he could see that she was already eyeing her wardrobe, considering what she’d wear that evening down to the pub. Where she’d meet a proper American G.I. who’d show her a proper good time. Lew couldn’t even Lindy Hop. 

In a final attempt to soothe his wounded pride, she took a cigarette from the sleek box on her night table, lit it, and placed it carefully between his lips. 

“Not sure I’ve earned this,” he muttered around it, its glowing tip bobbing on each word. She smiled and gave his cheek a maternal pat before getting out of bed and beginning to dress. 

And that was when he’d noticed those twin cracks in the ceiling.

Faust met the devil at a crossroads and wound up losing his soul. Though the stakes weren’t perhaps quite as high, the struggle Lew currently found himself entangled in was no less of a torment. Betwixt and between in his own devil’s bargain, unsure whether it had damned or delivered him.

Dick’s promotion had been inevitable; he knew this. But it wouldn’t have happened with such haste had it not been for Lew’s insistent campaigning, first to Strayer and then, when he knew he had Bob convinced that the Battalion was hanging on by a thread without Dick, to Sink himself. 

And after seeing him crouched by the side of that road, folding into himself like he wanted to disappear; after reading that goddamn report with the images that now came unbidden, haunted his dreams - Dick yards ahead of anyone else, that utter fucking madman running all by himself straight into the blood-soaked field of death, because someone had to and Dick was born to be that someone - he knew he’d made the right decision.

Dick’s safety for a little bit of his happiness. He didn’t regret it. 

But there was no denying that Dick had left something on that road, and despite his best efforts to convince himself that it wasn’t his fault, Lew couldn’t shake the feeling that in losing Easy, Dick had lost a vital part of himself. In the months since command had fallen into his hands, he’d grown comfortable in his role as a leader. Comfortable, confident, brave. Selfless. Brilliant. All the things that made Lew hold his breath in wonder. He’d discovered something in himself that gave him purpose, that made him feel like his little life really mattered, and wasn’t that all anyone wanted? 

And Lew had played a part in taking that away. He was now in the midst of a painful reckoning, unable to ignore the truth that Dick’s reassignment had hurt him more deeply than Lew’s blundering infidelity. Which, he also knew, was the best word to describe how it must feel to him. Betrayal. He’d been unfaithful to Dick and to himself and to whatever it was they’d nurtured together, against every impassioned protest of their better judgement. 

But after everything, wasn’t it only natural? After the flak and dreadful rending of steel, the smoke that burned his throat and the yawning, pulsing darkness under flesh ripped back like the lid of a tin can. The relentless Georgia sun, the pissing English rain, the fields of purple heather trampled under the boots of men who should never have been there in the first place. After all of this, of course a certain bond would develop. That was just what happened in war, going all the way back to the Greeks. Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles… he couldn’t remember any more, except the grief that had hollowed Achilles like a crater and filled him back up again with such murderous wrath. 

He turned his head to the window. It had grown dark outside, a pall made thicker by the blackout, and Lew could hear the faint voices of neighbors greeting each other on their way home from work. But his mind was far away from this cozy kitchenette flat, with the hurricane lamp and victrola and chenille bedspread. Far away from stockings that had seen better days and the smell of Chantilly and rosewater and the rustle of rayon satin. Two months and he was still stuck there on that road, staring into the volatile face of something he could neither understand nor control. 

He’d forgotten something important, something defining. Dick had helped him to forget. Since the moment they’d met, Lew had wished he were a different person, or a different version of himself, perhaps. Something more than charm and privilege, a glimpse into a world of bought comfort. To be not merely entitled, but actually deserving, and that was the dark, beating heart of the matter. Lew had wanted it so badly that he'd let himself believe he really did deserve it, all of it. 

The way Dick looked at him with that heady combination of fascination and affection, like under his skin ran a rich vein of some rare and precious mineral, and Dick was the only one who knew it was there. The way Dick touched him. The way they’d touched each other, left invisible marks on each other’s skin, a talisman against any danger. Christ, he’d been naive. 

Because if Dick knew the truth, saw who he really was under his slick gloss of sarcasm and magnanimity, he probably wouldn’t even want to be his friend, let alone his -

“Would you - be a luv?” 

She pushed her arms through the sleeves and hiked the dress over her shoulders.

“Hm?” 

There was a brief, jarring moment as Lew realized that she was still there in the room with him. Just standing there with her dress open in the back, her arm twisted at an awkward angle, fingers stretched toward but not reaching the zipper.

“Oh. Sure.”

He zipped her up, careful not to catch her hair when he got to her neck. It should have called to mind any of the hundred times he’d done this before, how such a small act could feel so heavy with intimacy and abiding love - or so perfunctory. Now it was just a simple human gesture. A nod, a friendly wave. A drink of water for a thirsty man. It meant nothing.

“My flatmate gets off at seven, so -” she said to her reflection in the mirror as she painted her lips a smooth shade of crimson. 

“I’ll clear out soon,” he assured her, but made no indication that he was in any sort of hurry. 

He knew why he’d come. What he was doing here. No worse than what he knew Dick probably expected of him. And it was fine. Better this way. Because this thing between them had an expiration date, and maybe he wanted to ruin it himself before time or gunfire or the cold math of reality did it for them. To have some control over it. If only to be the author of its destruction. 

It… what _was_ it? Was that the real trouble, his refusal to acknowledge what they’d made together? And why did it demand recognition, like some bastard prince coming out of exile to claim his right of succession? Lew was tired of humbling himself to his ungrateful heart. 

But deep down, he knew the truth. It turned sour in his stomach the longer he tried to deny it. 

Only one thing could hurt like this. 

**III. Mourmelon-le-Grand**

As a boy, Dick had loved thunderstorms. He still did. He’d be doing chores or playing ball with the neighbor kids and suddenly the wind would pick up and the light would take on an eerie, greenish pallor, like someone had hung a gaudy shade over the sun. He loved the urgency of shutting windows and hurrying to bring the wash in off the line, getting everyone inside before it hit, and the weatherman breaking into _Information Please_ to announce which counties lay in the immediate path of destruction. And then watching from the front porch, that thrilling combination of fear and excitement thrumming under his skin, as the rain clouds rolled in and released their swollen burden on the grateful land. 

He felt it for every mile of the long drive back to HQ, that same sense of a change in the weather, something in the air. A storm was brewing, and once again, he was both scared and excited to watch the havoc unfold, to feel it burst loose inside of him and rattle the shutters of his heart. 

If burst it must, which was far from certain. Maybe it would just fizzle out like a dud firecracker, or take a deep breath and hold it for the rest of the war. He could deal with that too, as long as he had something to go on. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes when he smiled. The way his hair fell in spiky, unkempt zigzags over his brow in the morning. Maybe that would be enough. 

He thought it had happened in Paris, the moment when the walls of his defenses had broken up like glass against a truth he’d been denying for too long. In his loneliness, he’d come to understand something about himself, and it was so simple and humbling that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t realized it sooner. It happened to everyone eventually, and it was a wonder Dick had gotten so far in his life without knowing what it felt like to love someone who didn’t love him back. 

But he could see now that he’d been wrong. Paris was just the ominous prelude, a moment of clarity before the reckoning yet to come. A calm before the storm. And though he had no idea of the damage it might cause, he was ready now, finally, to have it out. _Let it come,_ he thought. _Let the wind blow and the lighting strike, let the rain fall and wash us both clean again._ He closed his eyes and tipped his head back, and he could almost feel the cool drops showering his face.

He went directly to his office, unsure what he’d find there. Another stack of papers to sign, an inbox full of leave requests. Perhaps an itemized list of everything Sink had ordered him to do over the past few months, and the meager tally of what he’d actually accomplished. All the ways in which he didn’t measure up, laid bare in tight lines of smudged type and Army jargon.

So a part of him was surprised to see Nix in ODs sitting in the leather armchair, imposing himself on the scene like Dick was a guest in his own office. Of course, a deeper part of him wasn’t surprised at all. Hadn’t they always found their way back to each other? 

“What are you doing here?”

It came out harsher than he’d meant it to. Nix gave him a look that was pure outrage, but in an exaggerated sort of way that betrayed the amusement under its surface.

“Well, _bienvenue_ to you too.”

The corners of Dick’s mouth rose in a sad little half-smile. He really hated it sometimes, how he’d decide he felt a certain way and then with one look, Nix could unravel his resolve like it was held together with string. 

“I mean, I thought you were still - “

“Came back last night.” 

Dick sensed it hovering there between them, the question he was supposed to ask next. He felt suddenly like he was stuck in a recurring dream, bound to a story that did not deviate from a script written long ago, playing out the same way every night. But something in him resisted.

He dropped his duffel on the floor and slung one leg over a corner of his desk, neither sitting nor standing, like a coach preparing for a serious talk about Lew’s future with the team. Nix had one ankle propped on his opposite knee and was mindlessly bouncing it up and down, his fingers drumming an impatient cadence on his boot. He looked like he was struggling to hang on to his composure. He looked like he needed a drink.

They quietly appraised each other for a moment, each trying to guess what the other was thinking. Lew seemed nervous, fidgety, like he had some bad news and wasn’t sure how to break it to him. Dick started to feel anxious himself and began opening the buttons of his coat, just to have something to do. Moving made it easier, somehow. 

“Don’t get too comfortable,” Lew finally said. “We’re heading out in a few hours.”

Dick paused, his hands on his lapels. “And you’re here to help me pack?” 

Remarkable how easily they slipped back into their rhythm, despite the tension. Like finding a current and letting it carry them toward the dawn. 

“Just want to make sure you don’t forget anything we can’t live without.” 

And he didn’t need to slide the flask out of his interior pocket for Dick to know what he meant. As he pulled his arms out of the jacket's sleeves, his eyes met Lew's and did that thing where they appreciated how clever and brassy he was, but stopped short of approving. It was a fine balance and Dick wasn’t sure how much longer he could walk it without falling down. 

“So...” Lew’s voice was heavy with feigned anticipation. “How was your weekend?”

Dick shrugged. “Crowded. Disappointing.”

“Yeah, mine too.” Nix sighed. “Well, not crowded...” 

A clipped, bitter laugh escaped his throat, and it was Dick’s first hint that something was wrong, something that went deeper than his casual self-abasement. Dick used to find it charming, but lately it had begun to frighten him. They were tiptoeing around it in some absurd parody of a court dance and a feeling of exhaustion began to wash over him. He was so tired of playing this part, of pretending and dissembling and living off of crumbs. 

“Didn’t find what you were looking for?”

Nix raised and dropped one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. He looked out the window. 

“Honestly Dick, I don’t know what I was looking for.”

Dick’s face twisted into a mask of skepticism, all furrowed brow and ironic smirk. 

“Really.” 

A rare note of cynicism had crept into his voice. He didn’t like the way it sounded, but he was too sullen, too sore to let Nix off the hook that easily. 

How could things have changed so quickly? It wasn’t so long ago that he’d felt like he’d cracked open the shell of the universe and found the brilliant light of hope throbbing at its core. Now he felt that light fading a little every day. How long until it flickered and died out?

But then Nix looked back at him, with such wet pain staring out from the dark pools of his eyes, and sucked in a great draught of air, as though to steel himself before a sock in the jaw. Dick could hear his breath shake as he exhaled. 

Some gentle influence took over him then, the appeal of his better angels, perhaps. He stood, took a folding chair from the corner by the door, and set himself down on it, right in front of Lew. They couldn’t say the things that needed to be said across such a respectable distance. 

“Hey.” Dick leaned forward, his elbows propped on his knees, hands folded between them. He tilted his head to meet Lew’s downcast gaze. “What is it?”

“I shouldn’t’ve gone,” Nix said, and his voice sounded so brittle, so burdened with regret. It tugged at Dick’s heart, but not enough to wipe out completely the memory of his own hurt. He exhaled a long, weary sigh through his nose, the kind that sounds like holding a conch shell against your ear.

“I wish you hadn’t.”

Lew recoiled, sat back in the chair and gripped its arms so tightly his knuckles turned white. He looked up toward the ceiling and when he spoke again, he seemed to be talking more to himself than to Dick. 

“Why didn’t you say so? If you’d’ve said something...”

“Nix.” 

Dick paused a moment, debating whether he should continue. They were well beyond platonic now, had blown past those caution signs months ago. But this was different. This wasn’t burying his face in the musky shadow at the join of Lew’s neck and shoulder, the frantic strokes of a strong hand lost in the open flaps of his trousers, his eyes shut tight enough to block out everything except those blissful seconds of perfect, numbing release. 

This would change everything, which was exactly what he stood to lose. Everything he cared about. All that really mattered to him now. But he had his regrets too, and there was only one way to make them right. 

“I should have said a lot of things.”

Like a rifle sight zeroing in its target, Nix’s eyes found Dick’s, bore into them with such intensity that Dick felt for a moment like the air had been snatched right out of his lungs. And Nix just kept looking at him with that stubborn, desperate stare, at once eager and terrified to hear any more. 

“What things?”

Dick had to look away then, fixed his gaze instead on the sharp right angles of Lew’s bent legs. Carefully, he placed one hand, then the other on Lew's knees, rubbing his thumbs over knobs of bone through careworn fabric. 

“Lew… “ he began softly. “Do I need to? Don’t you know?”

He looked up into the man’s face again. What he found there destroyed the last fragments of reservation, and he knew for certain what he must do. It was time to let them go for good. 

Lew nodded slowly, and his eyes began to shine again, a glimmer Dick had seen before but hadn’t recognized. Truth. Beauty. Love. 

“Yeah. I do.”

Dick nodded back. "Good," he said, and then repeated it. "Good. I want you to know."

“All the same,” Lew continued. “I’d kind of like to hear it.”

Dick dropped his head and breathed a laugh at himself. To think Lew would let him get away with not saying it, that he’d be satisfied with mere allusion. No. Not his Nix. He’d have Dick writing it on the sky if he could.

He licked his lips, took a deep breath. Far off in the distance, he could swear he heard the soft rumble of thunder.

“I’m in love with you.”

Dick raised his right hand, bridging the space between them. Lew mirrored the pose, reaching his left hand toward Dick, and their fingers slid together like a dovetail joint.

“I think I’m in love with you too.” 

Lew pulled Dick’s hand to his chest and Dick sat forward in his chair, bringing his forehead to rest against Lew’s. With their other hands, they held the back of each other’s head, fingers lost in the soft nest of each other’s hair. 

Silence settled upon them. Dick felt the hard ridges of his muscles begin to soften, like the parched and cracked ground as it greedily drank in the precious water of life. 

“I don’t want to share you.”

“You won’t have to.”

Lew’s voice was so full of conviction, it cleaved what remained of Dick’s sorrow like a blade. But with his next words, it changed, grew meek as a child’s. 

“I don’t want to lose you.” 

Dick felt Lew’s lips against his knuckles as he confessed it, finally. His deepest fear. Dick was awed by it, the naked vulnerability and the strength he’d had to muster to say it out loud, and all he could do was hold onto him tighter. 

“You won’t.” 

He knew they were fools to make promises they had no way of keeping, but vows thus exchanged, they kissed, and their bodies became the bright center of the universe. The intimacy of the moment expanded and created its own weather, wind whipping into storms that blew across the continent, wave after wave spreading further and further away, to the very ends of the earth.


End file.
